Empowering your HR team with JIRA

These unflattering words were used to describe an HR Director whom many in the organization viewed as an obstacle. The problem was simple. HR was important, and HR was overloaded.

An HR team serves many masters. In their role of ensuring compliance with labor laws and equal opportunity employment regulations, they are one of your organization’s most important risk managers. They also support supervisors and mid-level managers, coaching them on how to bring out the best in their employees. As the gatekeepers to hiring (and firing) they directly impact every other team’s ability to do their work. Finally, they are charged with executing a myriad of tasks, be it filing a name change or handling applications for medical leave, for individual employees throughout the organization.

Small Processes Matter

Given their importance, their role at the very hub of your organization, you want your HR team to have the best systems available and to run as efficiently as possible. They probably already have some first class tools for managing key processes like tracking employee hours worked and benefits accrued. But what about all of those other processes HR has to deal with? Think of how much of smoother things would run if HR had a streamlined, electronic system for managing things like:

Advertising new positions

Opening new positions

Responding to employee leave requests

New employee orientation

Employee performance reviews

Approving employee’s requests to attend a conference

Checking the skills and qualifications of job applicants

Setting up employee files

Recording employee training

Safety monitoring

… and oodles of other processes that you count on HR to do.

Request Management System for HR

Imagine if your HR team had a request management system that allowed them to receive, respond to and track requests in a simple and organized manner, without paper forms or confusing email threads.

ThinkTilt offers over 30 ready to use process templates for HR teams and our library continues to grow. These easily customizable templates empower HR teams to manage requests with all of the functionality of JIRA Service Desk. Let’s consider an example of an employee requesting paid leave:

An employee submits a form through the HR portal requesting paid time off. This creates a JIRA issue with the completed form attached.

A member of your HR team works through all the open requests in the JIRA Service Desk queue. They receive the request, verify that the employee has included all of the required information in the form and assign the issue to the employee’s supervisor for approval.

The supervisor receives a notification that the issue has been assigned to them. He/she accesses the issue via the portal and completes the approval form, then assigns the issue back to HR.

The HR officer opens the issue, verifies that the information is complete and approved and inputs the required information into the payroll system.

The HR officer now marks the issue as Complete and the employee and the supervisor receive a notification that the request has been granted.

Your HR team has the ability to customize the forms so that the correct information can be collected up-front, without that endless chain of emails going back and forth. All of the forms are attached to the one JIRA request, so the process doesn’t get derailed by a form getting lost in someone’s inbox.

Using JIRA Service Desk for HR is beneficial to everyone involved. The customer, in this case the employee who is requesting leave, knows what needs be done and can check in on the status of the request at any time. HR now has an easy way to track, manage and respond to request, allowing their team to function more efficiently. Using JIRA Service Desk also means that there is an automatically created record of what has been completed. This not only assists in proving compliance, it allows your HR team to know how frequently specific requests come in and how much time is needed to resolve them. With this baseline information in hand, HR can allocate its resources to maximize efficiency.

ProForma can make managing Human Resources humanly possible. We have a suite of HR process templates that are ready to use. Your team can be using JSD to manage their processes within a day- not training time needed. In fact, if you send us the details of one of your HR processes, including its associated forms (PDFs, Word, FormStack, etc.), we’ll convert it into a ProForma template, free of charge with no obligations. We think that once you’ve seen how ProForma can empower your HR team, you’ll want more.